Bingo Hall Industry In Trouble
19th November, 2007
Last week, Rank group, the tourism & leisure company who owns Mecca Bingo and Grosvenor Casinos, made a profits warning. Due in part to the smoking ban, along with the steep double taxation that only the bingo industry receives, Rank chief executive Ian Burke fears more bad news is to come.
Bingo operators pay 15% gaming duty as well as 17.5% VAT, making them the only form of gambling to be double taxed. The industry is currently pleading with the government to drop the VAT .
After Rank’s stock collapse (a startling nose-dive of 163p to below 89.5p, bingo industry figureheads began having a few serious chats. Paul Talboys, chief executive of the Bingo Association said:
“The Prime Minister promised to talk to [Chancellor Alistair] Darling about the situation with an answer ahead of next year’s budget, and he asked [Sports Minister Gerry] Sutcliffe to look into any action his department could take to help with the new gambling laws.”
To show the startling decline in the bingo hall industry, the height of bingo popularity in the sixties brought in almost 170 million visits to more than 1,500 clubs. In 2006, there were merely 81.5 million visits to 634 clubs. That’s more than half of the players ending their bingo days. Recently, 60 more bingo halls have closed, and 200 are in jeopardy from the taxation and smoking bans.
Do you think we’ve reached the end of our bingo hall-going days? Is it the fault of the taxation and smoking bans that Rank is suffering, or are people just transitioning to the online bingo world? Tell us what you think in our Bingo Forum, we here at Gaming Alerts want to know!
